Wikis

Hi everyone!

I have had a bit of experience using wikis. Jacquei Hicks and I created a teacherwiki for our pre-service teachers. It was primarily created as an alternative to the Curriculum subject guides, as it has a search function (although, the problem with searching wiki pages is that it doesn't search the whole text, only the title).

Click on the link to the teacherwiki, if you want to check it out.

The teacherwiki is particularly useful fro pre-service teachers, as it provides a service unique to the needs of this group of students. There are pages set out for each KLA (Key Learning Area). While I was working in Curriculum, part of my responsibilities were to maintain the wiki by adding any new or existing titles that I felt would be useful to pre-service teachers. This is particularly useful for students going out on prac who need resources for teaching a unit of work on bullying, or teaching an Antartica unit in HSIE etc etc.

Also on the wiki are links to professional organisations, and links to teaching notes related to children's novels.

We also started creating pages specific to units of study taught at the University, with weblinks to all of the pages that the lecturers referred to in their unit of study course readers or outlines. This is one way in which wikis could support our students, that falls outside of the scope of something like libguides.

The collaborative nature of wikis, which allow registered users (in the case of the teacherwiki) to edit pages, means that people can share their teaching ideas, or put up any excellent lesson plans thay have written, in order to share teaching ideas and resources. However, one of the issues we found, was the difficulties we had advertising the wiki to the student population, and encouraging them to actually edit pages. I think this has more to do with the fact that we need to educate our students in the use of such web2.0 applications, which has implications for library staff and the way future training sessions may evolve, to include this sort of training.

As to what ramifications the success of Wikipedia will have on our students, this includes the potential for more plagarism and the use of unreliable, or unacademic sources in assignments, which is always a worry! Once again, this signals the need for library staff to provide good training in the foundations of finding reliable academic citations. However, our current mode of library workshops still place the onus on students to register themeselves for workshops, which as we all know, can leave out the student who needs the most help, as they may not be motivated enough to seek out this help.

How do you think we can help improve this situation? Any thoughts?